Roberts’s “claims to special
insights and divine orders and supernatural visitations” led critics to say
that his “overheated imagination . . . [was] a fatal blow to real . . .
religious movements.”[1]  Indeed, after Roberts’s ministry had run its
course, in the areas where he had preached “the revival disappeared, and
[Roberts’s work] has made those valleys in Wales almost inaccessible to any
further divine intervention.”[2]  “Many . . . voiced criticism of the revival
for its failure to achieve any long-lasting results,”[3]
and Roberts himself, some time later, “explained [as] tragic errors” a variety
of his supernatural declarations, affirming that they were “evidence of Satan’s
power to exercise control . . . by entering into the heart, influencing the
mind, and troubling the spirit.”[4]  Thus, Evan Roberts himself affirmed that
Satan had entered his heart and affected his mind and spirit during the Welsh
holiness revival.[5]  “Roberts later became very critical of the
revival for its emphasis on emotional excess and what he saw as the influence
of demonic powers.”[6]  He declared: 
“[D]uring the revival in Wales,
I, in my ignorance, did not escape the wiles of the enemy.”[7]  Indeed, Evan Roberts confessed that he had
not “escaped the wiles . . . [of] the arch-fiend,” but had “deep, varied, and
awful experiences of the invisible powers of darkness.”[8]  In “later years . . . he . . . would question
whether it was the Holy Spirit who commanded these things,”[9]
and “he confessed to a fear that he had been tricked by Satan.”[10]  In fact, he came to see that many of the
“visions and voices he had known and all the examples of his strange power to
look into people’s thoughts and feelings” were “proof that he . . . had been
deceived” during the Welsh holiness revival. 
He likewise recognized that in important aspects of his Keswick holiness
message “he had been deceived by the father of lies.”[11]  His admission that much of his teaching and
practice were demonic was undoubtedly correct.

            Regrettably, Roberts did not come to
see as evil all, but only some, of his revelations from the spirit world.  Furthermore, he did not consider sola Scriptura and cessationism as the
“antidote to deception,” but the doctrine of the Cross that Jessie Penn-Lewis
had herself learned by a vision in accordance with her belief in the Quaker
Inner Light.[12]  Nevertheless, Roberts acknowledged that “he
began to find it hard to distinguish Satanic suggestions from the Spirit’s
promptings, and even harder to discern which ‘voices’ were only echoes of
desires within his own mind.”  He “could
not always see when his visions and voices were . . . spiritual” and when they
were not, and recognized that he needed help so that he could get to the place
where he could “differentiate [the] voice [of the] Lord . . . from the cunning
of the Evil One.”[13]  He had at one time stated:  “I am as certain that the Spirit has spoken to
me as I am of my own existence,” as he was “[a]t the time . . . hearing this
actualized voice” while “heading for a bout of nervous prostration and
depression and perplexity.”[14]  However, at another time he “told . . . [an
assembly of] students that he was not even sure whether the Spirit suggested
things or actually spoke.”[15]  Sometimes a spirit would speak to Evan in
Welsh, sometimes in English, and sometimes in both.[16]  He had such close connections with the spirit
world that “a voice” even told him things as small as to “draw a fourth line”
underneath a word he had underlined three times or to command:  “[R]ise from your bed.”[17]  A “voice” led Evan on the “journey which
ended in a full acceptance of the doctrine of identification with the Crucified
One”[18]
learned by vision and then preached by Jessie Penn-Lewis.

            In any case, although he admitted
that Satan had entered his heart, many of Roberts’s visions were viewed as “truly
inspired,” and these marvels validated that the statements in Joel 2:28-32 and
Acts 2:17-21 about visions were being fulfilled in Wales.[19]  After all, Roman Catholic monks and other
“Welsh heroes” had experienced similar supernatural guidance.[20]
Since he considered only some of his supernatural encounters as Satanic, when
Roberts emerged briefly from two decades of seclusion in the Penn-Lewis
household in the “Little Revival” of 1928-1930, which was “short-lived” and
restricted to “the faithful ones in and near Gorseinon and Loughor” rather than
being “a national awakening,”[21]
he again employed his powers of seeing people’s hearts and was involved in
“healings, exorcisms, and . . . prophesyings.” 
All such “gifts of the Spirit were scriptural” for the present day, he
believed, a view he had held since at least the time of the 1904 Welsh holiness
revival on.[22]  “It was hardly surprising that some thought
that Evan Roberts had become an Apostolic or Pentecosta[l].”[23]

            However, it was “an unpleasant shock”
for Roberts to discover that already in “1931 . . . [there were] few signs of
the [1928-1930] revival’s lasting influence.”[24]  “One year later he went into final retirement
and vanished into the shadows of history,”[25]
becoming “almost a forgotten man.”[26]  Many considered his lack of attendance at
prayer meetings and other church events in favor of discussions among poets and
attendance at “theatres . . . [a] proof of serious backsliding.”[27]  Roberts “abandoned his rigorist ethics, went
to football matches and smoked a pipe.”[28]  In 1942, advising David Shepherd in a letter,
Roberts said nothing at all about praying and wrote:  “The only word I would have you receive from
me is, ‘Use your commonsense.  Revelation
tends to undermine it.  Harness your
intellectual powers and drive hard.’” 
This advice was very “unlike the man who saw visions . . . and even more
unlike the great intercessor and valued adviser of The Overcomer period.  Surely
some kind of personal declension had overtaken him.”[29]  He lived a reclusive life in his old age,
living off from the gifts of “Welsh friends . . . which supplemented his
pension and the quarterly allowance from the Aged and Infirm Fund.”[30]
He “show[ed] little enthusiasm . . when people began to talk about a fortieth
year anniversary meeting of the revival . . . [in] 1944 . . . and he finally
sent his excuses.”[31]  History notes that after leaving the home of
Jessie Penn-Lewis:

[He] spent most of the rest of his life in lodges in Cardiff.  Although initially dedicating himself to a
ministry of intercessory prayer . . . [he evidenced growing] dissatisfaction as
he grew older.  Notebooks in which he
wrote during the last decade of his life reveal him as a lonely and somewhat bitter
figure and are . . . almost totally devoid of religious zeal.  Witness the following verse, written in
English and dated 1 December 1944:

I’ve changed, I doubt it not, I’ve changed a lot,

I know I feel a change as great as odd,

To think I have come home and am forgot

As much by kin as I have been by God.[32]

He died in a Cardiff
nursing home on 29 January 1951.[33]

Roberts’s
final testimony was, sadly, far more like that of Demas (2 Timothy 4:10),[34]
and like those who confused standing up with conversion and regeneration in
Roberts’s holiness revival meetings, than that of the Apostle Paul:  “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith:
henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord,
the righteous judge, shall give me at that day” (2 Timothy 4:7-8).

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